


Guilt

by isa_belle



Category: The Dragon Prince (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Rayla kills a guy, Sort Of, shes pretty torn up about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-08
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:08:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21722755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isa_belle/pseuds/isa_belle
Summary: The blade slips from Rayla’s grip, clattering against the stone. She feels her heart drop with it.or, Rayla is forced to kill someone and deals with the moral consequences
Relationships: Callum/Rayla (The Dragon Prince)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 64





	Guilt

**Author's Note:**

> This is kinda shitty but there ya go

The blade slips from Rayla’s grip, clattering against the stone. She feels her heart drop with it. 

Then she feels a weight in her stomach, heavy and solid, like a bolder in her, dragging her down, emptying her out, filling her with sickness and poison. She stumbles backward, glancing down at her trembling, bloodied hands. She finds that she can’t look away, can’t stop studying the red drowning her fingers, thick and bright, under her fingernails, under her _skin_. She falls back a few more steps, gasping for air, like she’s forgotten how to breathe. She pants and heaves, trying to convince her lungs to _stop being difficult_ _,_ and let the air in, but it’s no use. She tries to drag herself away, but she feels a little silly, childish, and ridiculous. She’s an assassin. Or at least, she was. This should be nothing to her. This man should be nothing to her.Her mind screams to not look at his corpse ( _corpse_ ). It says _turn around and pretend it never happened ,  brush off your hands and march back to your camp. Put on a smile and move on.  _

But her heart, the one in her chest, thumping rapidly, rattling in against her ribs, tells her no. It makes her stand there, makes her think, about everything this man could have been, a father, a husband, a best friend, a son. Rayla tells it to shut up, that the man was trying to kill them, she had no other choice. The man was bad, not a son or a father or a lover or a friend, he was evil. 

Her heart reminds her that those aren’t mutually exclusive. 

She’s better than this, she has to be, she trained for years, sparing and shooting and punching, it has to mean something. Right? She should be stronger. She stands up straight (she still can’t breathe) She  _ is  _ stronger. (She wheezes and tears sting her eyes) She looks at the man. 

Rayla almost vomits, bile rising in her throat, sour and thick. 

The man’s eyes are open, wide and cold. They’re green and lifeless and his face is pale and empty. If she touched him he’d be cold. And she can’t stop _looking_ and she can’t stop _thinking_. (She needs to breathe, there’s no air left and she needs to breathe) About how it’s her fault. It’s her hands that put his body there.  _Who was he?_ She wonders helplessly, dizzy, and shaky. _Who did he love? Who did he-_

She cuts herself off, jerking her head violently, tearing her eyes away from the man, shutting them and turning away. She tries to ease her conscience, as much as she can. (Her lungs burn in her chest) She thinks of Runaan, all those years ago, in the Silvergrove, when she was younger and weaker and more naive. When she was childish and willing to believe. She asked him why. Why they killed, why they had to. And he had placed a gentle hand on her shoulder, and said sternly but not unkindly, “In this job, Rayla, we do things because we have to. Not because we want to, but because they must be done.”

_ Because they must be done.  _

She allows the words to fill her mind like water, tries to let them wash over her, to really sink in and seep deep into her soul, wash her clean. She finally takes a breath, unsteady and weak, but enough to keep her from losing her grip on the world. She turns around again and faces the man. He lays there on the stone at her feet, not that she’d expected him to move. She forces herself to stare into his green irises.  The blood pouring from his throat, sticky and slick, from the slice of her blade. 

( _ Because they must be done. She thinks.  _ _They must be done, they must be done, they must be done._ )

But her heart won’t slow down, still hammering against her ribs, and the breath she had is gone, she’s empty, and the guilt in her stomach just gets heavier, making it hard to walk and think. She feels hollow. She can’t focus. 

Rayla watches as her vision goes spotty, little dots of light swimming before her eyes as the earth sways beneath her feet. She’s floating away. She stumbles back. She feels weightless and she falls, dragging herself away from the man and to her feet. (Because they must be done) She stumbles back a few steps. Then a few more, and then she’s running, as fast as she can, tripping over her own feet and gasping and clutching her chest as her throat hallows out likes she’s going to cry. She runs back towards the camp, she runs back towards-

“Rayla?” Callum’s voice is tinged with concern and confusion, his eyebrows are twisted and she’s never felt more relieved to see his face. “Are you okay? Why are your hands all bloodied? Do you need help?” Rayla says nothing, she thinks if she moves her mouth she might fall apart, and there’s no way she’ll that that happen in front of Callum. He worries too much without her having breakdowns. And she doesn’t want to seem... weak. So she just throws herself at him, pressing her chest against his so she can try to match his pace of breathing. He hesitates a moment before placing his hands on her back gingerly, gently, as if he’s trying not to break her. He holds her there for a moment before muttering something she doesn’t care to understand and lightly pulling her away from him, looking her in the eyes as she unsteadily breathes and blinks away tears that she refuses to let come (Because they must be done. )

“Hey, hey. Rayla, it’s okay.” She feels Callum’s hand on her shoulder, feels it’s warmth as he drags it up to her cheek, caressing her face with a thumb. Rayla leans into the touch a little helplessly, feeling dizzy and nauseous and far away, grabbing his hand with her own and pressing it against her cheek. “Just breathe,” he says softly, exaggerating his own breathing so she can match him, “you’re okay now, I’ve got you.”

She tries to breathe through the tar in her lungs, coughing a little, placing a hand on Callum’s chest to feel his breaths and sync hers up. She opens her mouth to speak but Callum shushes her gently, brushing her hair out of her eyes and meeting her gaze, making her look at him. She sighs as her inhales even out and her exhales come a frequently as they need to. 

“Callum,” she tries, after a moment of steady breath, but her voice breaks on the word and she bites her lip hard to keep from crying, attempting desperately to hold herself together. He just holds her there, his hand warm on her face, murmuring gently to keep her calm. 

“You don’t have to tell me, Rayla.” He smiles sweetly and it all feels a little too real for her, she swallows big. 

“No, Callum. I-I want to.”

(Because the must be done) She plucks his hand from her cheek and holds it, missing its warmth as soon as it’s gone (Because they must be done) She squeezes hard and he squeezes back softer. (Because they must be done) She takes a shuddery breath. ( _Because they must be done _) She shuts her eyes. 

“There was a man in the woods”

Callum nods and tugs her gently over to sit on a rock with him, never letting go of her hand. He pauses before he urges her on, not prodding too roughly, (for her sake, she knows, but something about being treated so delicately makes her plant her feet and open her mouth)

She sucks in a quick breath, “I killed him.” 

Rayla’s voice is raw, cut open and full of emotions. She blinks faster now, and Callum brushes her eye with a thumb before the tears can fall. His face has paled a bit too, but bent with some form of pity too, “oh Rayla, I-“

“Don’t.” She yanks herself away from him, turning away and curling in on herself, feeling dumb and vulnerable and weak (and stupidly unbearably cold now that she’s away from him). Callum says nothing then, just sits besides her and waits, patiently too, ready to listen. After a minute of borderline uncomfortable silence she starts to speak again, hesitant, voice dripping with trepidation. “I looked at him after I- ya know. He just looked so cold Callum, he looked dull and empty, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how it was my fault.”

“Rayla-“ Callum starts, but Rayla has started and she damn well won’t let herself stop now. 

“I know what you’re gonna say, and you’re right. I had to do it, he was after us-well, just you, I suppose,” she huffs out a dry laugh, her voice brittle, tears welling up in her eyes and burning her throat. “They always seem to be after you. He was was gonna kill you, Callum. I don’t regret what I did. But I still feel...  sick. It’s like, I know that he’s bad, but no one’s really bad, right? Isn’t that what we’ve been fighting for? The man was gonna kill us.” She says (and she believe it too but he was still a  _person_ ) “Callum, he had a life! I know I’m an assassin, or- I was. I trained my whole life for this. I just never thought it’d feel so  _wrong_ .”

When she’s done speaking she looks back to Callum’s eyes. She's not sure what she’s searching for but she knows that she is searching. Maybe for rejection, or horror in his eyes. Maybe she’s waiting for him to call her a monster and walk says. And she can’t read his face but when she glances to his eyes they shine a little, glistening with light (she can’t help but think about how they’re full of life, so far from the greens that lay on the stone in the wood) he smiles a sad smile and pulls her back to his chest. When she feels her face against his shoulder, something in her finally snaps, the endless chant of ‘because they must be done’ crumbles to ash in her fingers. A sob rattles her chest and she chokes trying to contain it. 

“It’s okay, Rayla.” Callum mumbles, his breath warms her ear, “you’re allowed to cry.”

So she does. As one final effort to contain her guilt and grief comes and goes she start to cry. And then she cries some more, and she cries and she cries and she cries until Callum’s shirt is soaked through and her eyes are swollen and the hole in her chest is a cavern. “It’s my fault, Callum,  _ I _ killed him!” she sobs. 

He holds the back of her head, “I know.”

But he doesn’t. He doesn’t know the look of the man's lifeless eyes, the green rapidly fading to washed-out gray, doesn’t understand the weight of her blades as the slipped from her grip. She lets out a startled laugh, sniffling a little. 

“What?” Callum asks, puzzled (she can almost see his face in her mind, his eyebrows pinched together, lips bent at the corners)

“I left my swords in the woods.”

“Oh well that's okay, we can just go get them.”

She shakes her head, mussing her hair up against his shoulder. “They’re right by him.” She doesn’t need to specify who ‘he’ is. She hears Callum inhale, apparently coming to some sort of resolve. 

“I’ll do it then.” He sounds sort of defiant like he won’t take no for an answer, and she loves him for it, but she doesn’t want him to have to see that. 

“No, Callum, I’m not going to make you do that. We’ll worry about it later, okay?”

He looks at her for another beat, then nods a little. They sit like that for a while, just soaking up each other’s presence, Rayla wipes her cheeks with the flat of her hand, sniffling and peeking at Callum in the corners of her vision. He holds her and fiddles with her hair. 

“You know something Rayla?” He murmurs in her ear. 

“Mm?”

He clears his throat and pulls her back to meet her eyes, “sometimes, you have to do things that are bad, not because you’re bad, but because-“

She sighs “because they must be done.”

“Don’t sigh, it’s true” he tucks her hair behind her ears. 

“‘S what Runaan told me when I was young.”

“Well he’s a pretty wise guy”

She chuckles a little and leans against his side, not feeling great, but feeling better. And that's something. “How do you do that?” She asks, genuinely curious, “how do you always manage to cheer me up?”

He smiles at her, his cheeks going a little pink, “I just know you, Rayla”

“Yeah, I guess you do.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed leave a comment, they’re always appreciated :) bye


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